Fla. couple threatens bank with foreclosure

By Tamara Lush -
Associated Press -
Monday, June 6, 2011

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) — Months after Bank of America wrongly foreclosed on a house Warren and Maureen Nyerges already had paid for, they still were fighting to get reimbursed for the court battle.

So on Friday, their lawyer showed up at a branch office in Naples with a moving truck and sheriff’s deputies who had a judge’s permission to seize the furniture if necessary. An hour later, the bank had written a check for $5,772.88.

“The branch manager was visibly shaken,” lawyer Todd Allen said Monday, recalling the visit to the bank last week. “At that point I was willing to take the desk and the chair he was sitting in.”

After the moving company and sheriff’s deputies get their share, the Nyerges should receive the rest of the money this week, ending a bizarre saga that started when they paid Bank of America $165,000 cash for a 2,700-square-foot foreclosed home in Naples in 2009.

About four months later, a process server knocked on their door and handed Mr. Nyerges a notice of foreclosure.

“This is a big mistake,” he recalled saying. “You must have the wrong house. We bought a foreclosure and don’t have a mortgage.”

That started 18 months of frustrating phone calls, paperwork and court hearings. Whenever Mr. Nyerges called the bank, representatives told him to “come up to date” with his payments. When he called 25 different law firms, no lawyer would take the case. When he went to court, the lawyers for the bank filed incorrect motions and were woefully unprepared for the hearings.

“It was mind-boggling,” said Mr. Nyerges, a 46-year-old retired police officer. “To try to unscrew the screw up, it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Eventually the Nyergeses found Mr. Allen. They fought the foreclosure and won, proving that they owned the home outright.

During his research, Mr. Nyerges heard that his name got transposed from purchase agreements onto the prior foreclosure.

“I don’t know if that is a fact, because no one really had the facts,” he said.

In September 2010, a judge ordered Bank of America to pay the couple’s $2,534 attorney fees. But by last week, the bank hadn’t paid up, so Mr. Allen got a judge’s permission to seize assets.

In an email to the Associated Press on Monday, Bank of America spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens apologized to the couple about the “delay in receiving the funds.”

“The original request went to an outside attorney who is no longer in business,” she wrote.

The law office of David J. Stern, which handled the Nyergeses’ case for Bank of America, told judges across Florida in March that it will end its involvement in 100,000 foreclosure cases.